SOURCE: Folks, Jeffrey J. Review of Women with Men, by Richard Ford. World Literature Today 72, no. 1 (winter 1998): 133-34.

In the following review, Folks calls Women with Men “one of Richard Ford's most sensitive and contemplative works of fiction.” Folks discusses Ford's treatment of the themes of alienation, exile, loneliness, and frustration, contending that Ford records contemporary life in an observant and honest way.

The theme of minor alienation and a contemporary tone of insincerity underlie each of the three stories in Women with Men. Martin Austin, a forty-four-year-old sales representative from Chicago, abandons his wife Barbara to join Joséphine Belliard, a subeditor at a textbook publishing house in Paris. Martin's fumbling, ill-timed, and ultimately dangerous efforts to press a relationship with Joséphine reveal his pitiable lack of self-awareness. As Joséphine says, “You cannot live a long time where you don't belong. It's true?”

Martin's discontent...